RMcGirr83 wrote:My personal take on it is because naderman is heavily involved with composer.

Interesting (and props to him) but you misunderstood my question. Composer is popular among newer frameworks and I understand why it's used. My question was about why the lead devs don't run composer on their own machines and then push the result of using it to github?
Or are you saying that Naderman has the ulterior motive of getting others to have to use composers to push it on devs? Because I kinda doubt that.

We don't really want to include vendor files in the develop branch because:
1. It adds an extra 10MB of files to our repository, making things slower
2. Pull requests become significantly more messy if the files in vendor are changed (if a new requirement is added or vendor libraries are updated, thousands or tens of thousands of lines of code may be changed, obscuring the important things).

Vendor files are available by grabbing a nightly build (you can just copy them to your checkout of develop) and they will be included on every release. The files rarely change, so you should not have to update them often if you're following develop.

All this is understandable, but why isn't anything of this listed in the Get Involved page?
All it says is:

Contribute code

Contribute code in the form of patches to assist the developers in the development process.

Requirements: Be a reasonably-experienced developer or designer willing to license code under the GPL.

How: Attach a patch or link to a GitHub branch to a ticket created in the bug tracker or an RFC on Area51.

Even links to the right packages are scattered among numerous posts here on Area51 and Github. No willing soul can find this. Nothing is mentioned about knowing how to work command line to get composer, no single line or link to something about push/pull/whatever requests...

As said before: a reasonably-experienced developer or designer has to spend an entire afternoon digging through phpBB.com forums, Area51, the Wiki, Github and even Google before he can start contributing. Hey, I dunno, but maybe that's the reason there aren't so many non-team contributers?

Above message may contain errors in grammar, spelling or wrongly chosen words. This is because I'm not a native speaker. My apologies in advance.

Ger wrote:As said before: a reasonably-experienced developer or designer has to spend an entire afternoon digging through phpBB.com forums, Area51, the Wiki, Github and even Google before he can start contributing. Hey, I dunno, but maybe that's the reason there aren't so many non-team contributers?

At least I'm not the only person confused about where to find stuff. I looked through the 3.1 status thread and wherever else I thought to look through. It's probably posted somewhere obvious that I should see... But then there are other places where it isn't posted.

Ger wrote:All this is understandable, but why isn't anything of this listed in the Get Involved page?
All it says is:

Contribute code

Contribute code in the form of patches to assist the developers in the development process.

Requirements: Be a reasonably-experienced developer or designer willing to license code under the GPL.

How: Attach a patch or link to a GitHub branch to a ticket created in the bug tracker or an RFC on Area51.

Even links to the right packages are scattered among numerous posts here on Area51 and Github. No willing soul can find this. Nothing is mentioned about knowing how to work command line to get composer, no single line or link to something about push/pull/whatever requests...

As said before: a reasonably-experienced developer or designer has to spend an entire afternoon digging through phpBB.com forums, Area51, the Wiki, Github and even Google before he can start contributing. Hey, I dunno, but maybe that's the reason there aren't so many non-team contributers?

Okay im currently on it, updated to the following so far:

Contribute code

Contribute code in the form of pull requests to assist the developers in the development process.

Requirements:

Be a reasonably-experienced developer or designer willing to license code under the GPL.

Basic knowledge about git and github (required to get the latest development version).

Create a new branch based on the latest <em>develop</em> / <em>develop-olympus</em> branch (depending on the Issue's Fix-Version), named <em>ticket/ID</em>. For more information on the Github Repository see: https://wiki.phpbb.com/Git#phpBB3.

Thanks, this is already much better. Just those three links makes life easier.

Some explanation about composer and dependencies would be nice. Simply copying the composer section of https://wiki.phpbb.com/PhpBB3.1#Composer would be sufficient I think.
Of course the entry on the Get involved page can be kept short and simple, but getting all the info linked to (with short explanations) in one central section of the phpBB site makes it much easier to understand how to contribute.

Above message may contain errors in grammar, spelling or wrongly chosen words. This is because I'm not a native speaker. My apologies in advance.